Thursday, 24 October 2013

‘Somber’ and ‘haunting’ are terms that
surround Deptford Goth and the kind of delicate synth pop that the Londoner
brings to LEAF Tea shop tonight. Since James Blake crooned his way into
mainstream consciousness with his Mercury nominated debut, melancholy has
always sat awkwardly amongst critical and commercial perception, swinging like
a pendulum between derision and acclaim as artists fall on the right, or indeed
wrong side of ethereal or dreary.

Life
After Defo, Daniel Woodhouse’s tentatively
acclaimed debut album, for all its warmth and heart, stayed indirect and
ambiguous lyrically, instead using indistinct emotions and sentiments as a way
of creating an sweeping, and at times very moving sense of uncertainty. The
danger of this form of songwriting of course, is that it very much relies on
the listener’s own sense of empathy and imagination, translating into
insincerity, even laziness for those not looking to put the work in. Now some
of the best songs of all time are built around ambiguity and being open
interpretation. I mean just look at Motown
in the sixties, Pop Music in the eighties and even more recently; Matt
Berninger’s The National. Creating
music that provokes emotion on a more expressive level relies almost entirely
on the delivery. This is where much of Life
After Defo as a record succeeds, as alluring synths and frostbitten chords
coax these songs into a state of emotiveness beyond what Woodhouse is capable
of achieving lyrically. It is fitting then, that this is where this evening’s
performance all falls down.

Accompanied only by a Cellist, Woodhouse
stumbles into Defo’s title track like
a center back at a penalty shootout. Those little modified instrumental nuances
that brightened the album, whimper hesitantly as a vocal line is mumbled to the
point of where it could just be a continuous hum and no one would notice the
difference. I’m being unfair, but it shouldn’t detract from the baffling
indifference just dripping from every song that is rattled through. Feel Real is the Londoner’s only track
that even comes close to danceable, so it is no coincidence that it represents
the closest associations with pop music. That punchy, deliberate beat that
anchors the song is reduced to a muffled footstep, and with it the blood and
soul that kept it alive. Woodhouse and his Cellist eventually wake up during a
wilted rendition of Years, but only
to complain about the excessive chatter going on among the more unsympathetic
members of the audience. I mean, even in a venue as open as Leaf, a talkative
crowd has more of a reflection of the performance than the manners of those
witnessing it.

Bloody
Lip is one of the finest album closers this year,
offering a startling and very poignant moment of self-reflection, leaving the
listener with the sense that despite all the uncertainty, despite all the
doubt, this is a man who has found some peace in all the darkness. That
gorgeous refrain of ‘There has never been / And there will never be” is
disarmingly vulnerable, almost like Woodhouse is on the verge of disclosing a
secret but keeps changing his mind. Sung with such an alarming detachment this
evening though, it’s almost as if he just can’t be bothered to tell us. A great
show is meant to make you reassess an album, keeping it on repeat for the days
that follow as the songs take on new forms and sizes. Throughout every song
this evening though, I strain to try and mold the sounds emerging from the
stage into the shapes I’m used to hearing on the record.

I love the album, so I take absolutely no
pleasure in writing any of this. And of course, a record so rich sonically is
always going to be difficult to perform live, especially without any sort of
substantial tour budget. But with a sound built around such indirect, even
apathetic lyrics, it’s the textures, the instrumental flourishes, the shifts in
tone and dynamics that are relied upon to engage the listener. This evening is
evidence that Woodhouse is the only one who doesn’t understand this. More
worryingly though, it suggests that he isn’t being enigmatic or aloof, he just might
not have anything to say.

Wednesday, 9 October 2013

Electronic music has always been guilty of
creating icons too quickly. It’s relentless forward momentum and close
association with youth culture makes the trajectory of producers unnaturally
steep and inexplicably tenuous, creating an endless cycle of power rises and
power vacuums until we don’t even know what the fuck we like ourselves. In a
scene where 19 and 22 year old duo Disclosure
can be considered experienced heads, 37 year old veteran Bonobo has traversed his way through contemporary UK Electronic
music with a remarkable amount of staying power. And this year, with the
release of his excellent fifth album The
North Borders, Simon Green
paints an unlikely figure at the summit of a long list of thriving, crossover
producers.

Kicking things off with a mercilessly high
energy set is Liverpool University alumni Dauwd.
The North Wales producer is part of a growing number of artists fudging the
lines between house and techno, dressing abrasion in something a bit more
approachable by bringing melody into the mix. Drawing largely on the excellent Ghostly EP Heat Division, al-Hilaliincorporates
that immaculate synth work and those tuneful basslines to create a set rich in
aesthetics and diverse in textures.

Live electronic music is difficult. Artists
and producers spend careers in the studio trying to make music that pushes
sonic boundaries to their limits, utilizing extreme and complex recording
techniques to create a sound that ultimately reaches beyond what can be
reproduced live. Tonight Bonobo
draws on a full band of multi-instrumentalists and rhythm section in an attempt
to present one of the most intimate albums of the year to a buoyant and diverse
O2 Academy crowd.

Bonobo’s unweaning popularity can be credited, largely, to his ability to
synthesize classic electronic music with modern recording techniques,
culminating in a sound that is memorable whilst remaining distinct. And unlike
many of his contemporaries, he refrains from that kind of show stopping,
widescreen production, in favour of keeping things tight and purposeful, like
on the twitching, rhythmic Know You
and the lo-fi, woozy Pieces. There
are dense and intricate layers of textures at play here this evening, yet Green manages to retain that sense of
space that makes his recorded output so rewarding. These are subtly challenging
songs, made accessible to a wider, crossover audience by their infrequent nods
to commercial dance music. First Firescould
sit on an Oneohtrix Point Never
album if it weren’t for that graceful melodic, verse-chorus vocal line. Emkay paints this ambient, sparse
soundscape, but on top of a two-step garage beat making it dance floor ready as
the feet begin to move. Despite the technical prowess demonstrated in the
studio, tonight’s performance finds beauty in more natural, more humble places.
The faint sound of woodwind teased at the end of Sapphire brings the song gorgeously into focus, and the strings
that bloom in the closing moments of Ten
Tigers offer this timid piece some vitality in a wonderfully moving display
of human expression. It is these occasional instrumental flourishes throughout
the set that allow these songs to be played live as their own entity,
reinventing them as these dazzling arrangements and elevating them above the sum
of all their parts.

Live electronic music often feels like an
artist desperately trying to shoe-horn a live show into studio productions,
playing one beat per bar on an electric drum kit as the rest of the track plays
through their Macbook. It isn’t the artist’s fault; the growing popularity of
UK electronic music and the decreasing value in recorded music has meant that
electronic acts have to tour, have to play at festivals, have to play blog
sessions and all the rest. I mean, there is no reason why a producer should be
able to even mix live, let alone perform with instruments when an entire back
catalogue can be produced using one piece of computer software. Werk Disk’s Lukidrecently confessed to Fact Mag
that despite being booked for numerous ‘live’ sets, all he does is play tunes
through his laptop. There is no clarification on the boundaries and definition
on what constitutes as live because largely, you don’t know the extent of this
‘live’ show until you are in venue. The natural habitat of electronic music
will always be club nights, with packed sweaty dance floors, 4am curfews and
crippling comedowns. Tonight though, Bonobo has embraced the finer, but
essential live elements of his album by making it a performance rich in texture
and instrumentation, almost as if his collective are a live act trying to
incorporate electronic elements into their set. This is an artist who harbours a
deep respect for the soul of each sound he uses, whether it is synthetic or
from a live instrument, allowing the songs to become physical in a literal
sense and creating a show that is undeniably human.